Musical culture seems to resist illumination, perhaps fearing that the "magic" will somehow be broken. The irony is that music is, in a sense, a mathematical il

Musical culture seems to resist illumination, perhaps fearing that the "magic" will somehow be broken. The irony is that music is, in a sense, a mathematical illusion, but revealing the trick only makes it more fascinating. This is true, but I think the answer is far more mundane. Musicians operate at a couple of levels of abstraction above that SO answer, so such details become irrelevant to them. Imagine if the standard introduction to programming was a course on Java or PHP. Pretty soon you'd have a plethora of programmers who didn't know a thing about pointers or any of the old tricks programmers used to do with assembly. Wait... that's already happened :)